Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) technology has emerged to utilize the pre-existing Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS) networks to communicate data in a wireless manner. Mobile-end systems (MESs) incorporating the CDPD technology are capable of packaging data in small packets, accessing selected AMPS radio channels allocated for CDPD communications, and communicating the packets through the channels in bursts. Examples of such MESs include an automatic teller machine communicating transactional data, and a point-of-sale (POS) terminal communicating credit card data for verification thereof.
The CDPD channels constituting a CDPD network are shared by many MESs in a coverage area. A measure of a communication load on a CDPD channel is the number of the MESs using the channel at a given time. The performance of a balanced CDPD network with each channel having more or less the same communication load is superior to that of an unbalanced network with a few channels sustaining a disproportionately large load. This stems from the fact that balancing the load on each CDPD channel ensures that the capacity of each air link is utilized efficiently. In addition, as more and more MESs compete for air link bandwidth in the coverage area, the performance of a balanced network degrades more gracefully.
A prior art scheme for balancing the communication load in a CDPD network has been attempted. In accordance with this scheme, a hard limit is set on the number of MESs which can use a CDPD channel at a given time. However, despite this scheme, in practice all MESs in a coverage area occasionally end up using the same congested channel, leaving other channels unused.
Accordingly, there exists a need for an effective methodology to balance the communication load in a communication network to efficiently utilize the capacity of each channel in the network.